SHAMELESS:

Does shame have a future? (Roger Kimball, The New Criterion, September, 2004)

In Masaccio’s great fresco depicting the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden (ca. 1426), the Angel of the Lord hovers, sword in hand, above and behind the First Couple. Adam strides forward, naked, his face buried in his hands. Eve, however, a look of wailing misery on her upturned face, covers her breasts and privates as she walks. She is ashamed of her nakedness and strives to conceal it.

I thought of Masaccio when I stumbled upon Martha Nussbaum’s essay “Danger to Human Dignity: The Revival of Disgust and Shame in the Law,” which appeared last month in The Chronicle of Higher Education. How Nussbaum would disapprove of Eve!, I thought. For Martha Nussbaum—a classicist who is currently the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics in the Philosophy Department, Law School, and Divinity School at the University of Chicago—does not approve of shame. She is not too keen about disgust, either. Both emotions, she thinks, impede “the moral progress of society.” And here we have Eve, ashamed of her body, modestly shielding her sex from view: how very unprogressive. [...]

One of the oddest features of Hiding from Humanity is Professor Nussbaum’s recurring argument that the emotions of shame and disgust encourage us to ignore or discount our mortality, our incompleteness, our animality. No doubt Professor Nussbaum has managed to embrace her own animality without the benefit of shame or disgust. But for most of us, the emotions of shame and disgust are vivid reminders of our status as imperfect creatures, fragile, animal, and therefore mortal.

This is something embodied the world over in the idea of taboo, a concept with deep connections to the ideas of shame and disgust. These are insights we arrive at not by ratiocination but by feeling. As the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski writes, “We do not assent to our moral beliefs by admitting ‘this is true,’ but by feeling guilty if we fail to comply with them.” What we are dealing with, he points out, is not an intellectual performance but “an act of questioning one’s own status in the cosmic order, … an anxiety following a transgression not of a law but of a taboo.” Professor Nussbaum wants us to “discard the grandiose demands for omnipotence and completeness that have been at the heart of so much human misery.” Good idea! But shame and disgust are accomplices, not impediments, to that attack on hubris.

Mr. Kimbrall does an excellent job here of dissecting the conceptual legerdemain progressives use in their war on morality and religion, particularly the disingenuous claims of resurgences of long gone practices and beliefs. In the last hundred years or so, just about every tenet of traditional morality has been challenged with: a) a logical deconstruction that proves it is “irrational”(gasp!); b) the conviction, backed by infallible statistics, that it has no bearing anything else in life and stands in glorious isolation from everything else we do or think; and c) the insistence that it makes a lot of really nice, ordinary people unhappy for no good reason (or worse, warps them and makes them dangerous) and thwarts their rightful journey towards a higher level of self-fulfillment or self-awareness.

Liberals use to argue that loosening of moral strictures was an act of tolerance and charity benefitting a relatively small number of decent but unlucky victims and that there was no reason to fear that the majority would change their righteous ways. Its pretty hard to sustain that argument anymore, so the Ms. Nussbaum’s of the world have to deny the reality of human nature itself and present us with a gentler, more user-friendly version of Nietzsche instead.